THE NBA AT 75
From a very modest beginning, to a behemoth
It started in 1946 with 11 teams and 160 players. The shot clock was nearly a decade away, the 3-point line was a couple generations away. Buildings were smaller. So were the players. And it wasn’t even called the National Basketball Association.
The NBA, 75 years ago, was different in almost every imaginable way.
Over the coming months, The Associated Press will look back at what the league was on and off the court, how it became what it is and where it’ll be going over the next 25 years as it moves toward the century mark.
The series will recall those humble beginnings, with Ossie Schectman — who scored the first basket in league history — making $60 a game. It’ll show how what was happening in the country seemed to mirror what was happening in the league, from the league’s path toward integrating in the 1950s, to its stance on social issues and race relations today.
In those earliest of years, teams lost plenty of money. Some of the inaugural franchises only had inaugural seasons, folding after Year 1. There was no robust following and the NBA had little to no impact on societal issues.
And all the players were white.
“None of us who were playing at that time knew what this would be,” Schectman, who played for the original New York Knicks, said in a 2010 interview, three years before his death. “We didn’t know if this was going to work out and become something.”
Schectman scored the first basket in Basketball Association of America history; it wasn’t called the NBA until three years later, but the NBA counts those years as part of its own. It was an underhand layup for the Knicks in a game at the Toronto Huskies on Nov. 1, 1946, the first two points of 13.7 million in
league history and counting.
In time, Schectman got his answer: The NBA, indeed, would become something.
Today, the 30 NBA franchises are worth at least $100 billion combined, possibly much more than that. The league has a fan base that stretches to each corner of the globe and a reputation of being a leader when it comes to social issues.
Richard Lapchick, the son of former New York Knicks coach Joe Lapchick and researcher on social and racial issues within sport, said the
league’s platform has always provided an opportunity to be a conduit for change — perhaps never more so than now.
“I genuinely believe that the NBA, with Adam Silver as its current leader, is in this for the right reasons and has the support of the largest integrated labor force in America in terms of percentage of the population,” Lapchick said. “They’re also very wealthy, so they can use their resources — and this is new — to invest in social justice campaigns in their communities.”